MulchFest 2010

Not to bore you with yet another Xmas tree-related post, but this one comes more in the form of a public announcement. For those of you who are ready to oust your trees, the City has a great program called MulchFest that will allow you to recycle them! Just bring your Xmas tree to a local park on January 9th or 10th from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. to feed it through a wood chipper. (You can find listings of MulchFest sites by borough at the Parks & Recreation website or by calling 311.) The City will use the mulch to nourish trees citywide with enough mulch left over for you to take some home!








(I just love PlaNYC's spokesbird!)

O, Christmas Tree! Thy Leaves Are So Unchanging!

I've never had a Christmas tree before. However, raised in a loving, nondenominational household, I always had a proxy to fulfill my desperate urge to decorate in the holiday season. In early childhood, I made a succession of two-dimensional construction paper trees with removable paper ornaments. My parents finally broke down and bought me a small plastic tree from CVS, which I lovingly draped with origami ornaments. Last year, I greatly enjoyed the irony of hanging small glass ornaments from my tropical bonsai tree, a specimen that droops without a heat lamp in Brooklyn's winter climate. Poor thing.

This year, my boyfriend begged for a real Christmas tree. Although he had an upbringing similar to mine, he always had a Christmas tree. His entire family would trudge into the wilderness of Massachusetts (or drive to a Christmas tree farm; whatever, it's all weird to me) and chop down their tree themselves. How rugged.... As much as I love my boyfriend, I just couldn't do it. I could not have a dead tree in our apartment. So, I compromised: I bought a live, three-foot-tall Blue Dwarf Spruce (Picea glauca 'Haal').

Perhaps like many environmental enthusiasts, I didn't exactly think this one through. Evergreens go into a dormancy in cold weather. If they are brought indoors for an extended period of time, they come out of this dormancy and begin to grow. Once this happens, taking them back outdoors can shock them. Even if they don't emerge from this dormancy, one needs to have had the foresight to dig a hole in which to plant them before the ground freezes. Given the recent snow fall, I'd say that's no longer an option. Looks like I've got a new houseplant!

In Defense of Poison Ivy

I have always been a die-hard Batman fan, and one of my favorite characters besides the Bat himself is Poison Ivy. The origin story goes like this: Pamela Isley, a shy but attractive botany grad student, is seduced by her professor, who later poisons her. She survives and finds she has developed an immunity to all natural toxins. A supervillain is born. Yet this supervillain has a cause: Poison Ivy is a environmental preservationist turned fanatical bio-terrorist.

A friend of mine recently gave me a sweetly sinister little book by Amy Stewart titled Wicked Plants: The Weed that Killed Lincoln's Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities, which details some of the "unfathomable evils [that] lurk within the plant kingdom." Stewart posits that plants should be approached with a guarded respect, noting that "we all benefit from spending more time in nature -- but we should also understand its power... [plants] can nourish and heal, but they can also destroy."

In an episode of Batman the Animated Series, Ivy poisons Gotham's DA, Harvey Dent, in revenge for his destruction of nature in the pursuit of civic development. She reasons, "Plowing up a field of beautiful wild flowers for that silly penitentiary of his." "This little rose," she adds, gesturing to the poisonous agent, "would be extinct today if I hadn't saved my precious from those horrible bulldozers. The blood of those flowers is on his hands!"

It's hard not to like to Poison Ivy. She understands the power of nature and defends it, albeit in a twisted way. As the scales of the built and natural environment continue to tip in my Gotham, there's a small part of me that fantasizes about donning a green unitard and kicking some ass in the name of plants everywhere. But I'll settle for more reasonable methods. Persistence is key. As Ivy says when vanquished, "They can bury me in the ground as deep as they like, but I'll grow back. We always grow back!"

Nature vs. Pavement: Round 5

I don't know how someone thought a sufficient amount of water could get through those holes in the concrete. Clearly the tree thought this was stupid as well.















Park Place between Classon and Franklin Avenues, Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

Rage, Rage Against the Change of Season

Since most of the fall leaves are grounded, I was delighted to find some ginkgo leaves on Greene Avenue that, though they have been separated from their branches, have stubbornly seated themselves within the links of the fence surrounding the adjacent handball courts. Here, they cling, mimicking their former canopy, as if to say, "Do not go gentle into that good night!"

But that good night has come, so I thought I'd share some photos that I took of the beautiful changing foliage in the past month. Enjoy.

Challenges of Embracing a Waterfront

I picked up Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan by Phillip Lopate at the new Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene the other day. I am not too far into it and suspect it may be a bit outdated (published 2004), but Lopate has hit upon an interesting phenomenon: New Yorkers' mysterious hesitancy to "maximize [the city's] aqueous setting" and propensity to, instead, turn inland.

Lopate attributes this trend to several factors. He argues that the waterfront's past as an occupied industrial site deterred New Yorkers from conceptualizing it as a space open for residence and recreation, as they do Central Park and Central Park West. And, he posits, "nothing can replace the beautiful, urgent logic of felt need" that characterized the development surrounding industry (docks, warehouses, customs offices, bars, brothels and churches). While I agree that Manhattan doesn't yet adequately embrace its waterfront, I am not so sure about Lopate's argument. As noted in an earlier post, the waterfront was used as a recreational space even when that meant bathing in human and industrial waste, and, given many neighborhoods' current lack of inland park space, I would argue that there is certainly a "felt need" for public waterfront access.

Where Lopate and I do agree, is that the perimeter highways and railroad tracks in Manhattan constitute physical barriers to the waterfront. Unwelcoming and seemingly unsafe underpasses and overpasses create daunting obstacle courses that, let's face it, for many New Yorkers, is just too much of a schlep. Lopate dubs the West Side Highway and the FDR Drive "the Original Sin of Manhattan planning." To that I would add with heavy sarcasm, "thanks a lot, Robert Moses." As designs for new waterfront spaces are developed, designers continue to grapple with these obstacles to bring the public to the new amenities. My favorite proposal so far is to paint the underside of the FDR Drive a lavender color called "Mighty Aphrodite." I am not sure this will work, but I love the name!

I Want to Wake Up In the City that Doesn't Sleep

People seem to like disaster movies, particularly ones that leave New York City completely desolate. In these films, the city's infrastructure is intact, but bereft of human activity, it is defenseless as nature creeps back in. These movies play on the idea that urbanism and nature are mutually exclusive. As Eric Sanderson writes in one of my favorite passages of Mannahatta, "It a conceit of New York City—the concrete city, the steel metropolis, Batman's Gotham—to think it is a place outside of nature, a place where humanity has completely triumphed over the forces of the natural world, where a person can do and be anything without limit or consequence." The people are what make this city great.

This has been a frenetic, but exciting New York week for me. With Halloween, the marathon, the mayoral election and the Yankees' ticker-tape parade, I spent most of the last week overwhelmed by masses of people, their excitement and frustration crushingly palpable. At each of these events, I felt pride and enjoyment (yes, even at the ticker-tape parade, thanks to Jay-Z), but I also found myself searching for a quiet moment, a place to breathe, my own personal empty Times Square with meadow grass sprouting through the asphalt.

And this is why I think we like these disaster movies: because New York is as stressful as it is uplifting. Though we love our skyscrapers, sports events and over-the-top celebrations, there is a part of us that wishes for a quieter and more profound experience, which we see distilled by an idealized natural world.

Image from I Am Legend.